Using Sylvester Stallone as our guinea pig we examine the process for creating "life-like" avatars in Realxtend.
During last year realXtend virtual world platform included
possibility to "change head" of your avatar to any Ogre mesh. A
relatively easy way to make new mesh heads is to use Facegen
modeler.
There are two ways to make a head. Easy and very entertaining
way is to just use various sliders and tools to adjust gender,
race, color, age and shape of the face - to name just a few of the
possible adjustments.
The Facegen modeler can produce heads from photographs, where
only one direct front photo of face is needed. To get better
results, a side photo can also be used. Facegen uses both side and
front photos to estimate the shape of the head and it also uses the
photos to make the face texture. Note: the tools used to export the
facegen model to the proper Ogre mesh files do not support photos
bigger than 512x512, so be sure to resize your photos if they are
bigger than that.
First step to making an Avatar is to find good photos of the
subject. Here are two photos from Mr. Stallone, our guinea pig for
the experiment.
The calculation takes some minutes to complete. If you used own
photos, it is again very entertaining to check how you/Mr Stallone
will look. See The original Mr. Stallone, Stallone-san, Ubuntu
Stallone, Just-generated Stallone, Grand Old Stallone and Ms
Stallone below.
Once you are happy with the head, save it and launch FaceGen2rex
(FG2R), which you can download here. FG2R asks for some standard
files first to guide it in the export process; you can find them
from the FG2R install directory at data folder. You need to select
right files, though as there are separate ones for male and female
avatars.
Finally FG2R asks for your newly saved Facegen model, and after
processing it for a few seconds, it outputs a mesh and a texture.
The mesh filre should be saved to your realXtend Viewer
installation to folder /media/models/avatar/. You
need to provide an xml file too, you can simply copy kate.xml or
jack.xml and rename it as the same name as your moel, e.g.
stallone.xml. the face texture should be copied to
/media/materials/textures/avatar_face
directory.
At this point you're technically ready for the head change
operation, but there is still a need to do some artistic tweaking.
The problem may be that your neck is of different colour than
available body skins. If you plan to always use shirt with a
collar, then this may not be an issue. Superman suit, which comes
with the standard viewer, is also good in hiding your body skin. To
make a matching skin, you can take one of the existing skins and
copy it under a new name and edit RGB values of the skin to make it
match with the neck color. I am using photoshop for this, but you
can pick your favorite tool for editing.
The final step before building the avatar is to have the avatar
server running. You can use the public free avatar.realxtend.org service or
you can launch your own (get the server here). Once you have it set up,
you can launch the avatar generator. There you can change head,
skin and perform the rest of "bodybuilding". After you're finished,
hit "export" to save your avatar. In case you're using local
server, you can put "testuser@127.0.0.1" as the username and "test"
as the password.
Then you can run the realXtend viewer and login and be
what you always wanted to be (editors note. Jani, are
you serious that Sylvester is what you have always wanted to
be?).
To make nice screenshots, I recommend playing with different sun
positions and post processing effects. Make yourself famous and
send your best creations to us and we will publish the best ones
inside articles with credits! You can find some samples of ready
made Avatar heads also from rexxed.com.
Note: Some of the images used in this article
may be subject to copyright. They appear here for information
purposes only. Nothing in this article suggests that Mr. Stallone
either endorses or has any connection with the products
mentioned.
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